Big Jim was enormous. To call him big was a compliment; we could certainly have come up with a more florid and damning nickname had we set our minds to it. Words such as "planetary" and "humongous" were in our lexicon at the time. Lenny Druckman referred to him as "Lord Big Jim" a few times after we were all herded into the auditorium to see a scratchy print of the movie with Peter O’Toole, which the vice-principal had said was supposed to do something to our awareness. It didn’t catch on. I thought of calling him "larger than life," but never said it out loud because the guys could easily have turned around and applied it to me. Eventually I used it against myself anyway, to keep from getting beaten up by Otha Lawrence, the goalie on the soccer team, who heard me giggling in the hallway one day and thought I was making fun of him. Most of my best lines in high school were directed against myself. That was how I made friends.
Big Jim drove the late bus. Over time, his name, and the very words "late bus," became synonymous with punishment, more so than the official term "detention," a word we often cloaked in fake sneezes in homeroom. The ride was interminable, the one bus dropping off kids from all of the fifteen or so bus routes who had to stay after school. Guys at lunch liked to gripe that they were last off the late bus, but whenever I was on board I was last off, because I lived in a development just up from the school bus garage.
I am trying to remember whether Big Jim was his real nickname, or if it was what we called him behind his back. I can’t picture anyone saying it to his face, but then I don’t remember anyone ever talking to him at all. He just sat there, the dull green seat cushion vanquished underneath him, his forearms resting on the steering wheel, breath issuing audibly from his scowling mouth, eyes radiating terror and doom. If you shouted or stood up or otherwise misbehaved while the bus was in motion, he’d search you out in the rear view mirror. You could feel him staring at you, damning you for the infraction that had condemned you to the late bus in the first place, and you shut up or sat down or obeyed whatever command was implicit in his gaze.
Only once did things progress beyond the rear view mirror. Cindy Setren, the bulk of her head out the window, was shouting to someone on a passing motorcycle. Cindy wore serious leather at fourteen, and oozed scorn and violence. She was reputed to have stabbed a guidance counselor at another school. The rest of us on the bus sat transfixed in Big Jim’s mirrored eyebeam, but Cindy continued shouting, oblivious. Big Jim applied the brakes and stopped the bus in the lane. Cindy craned forward as the bike pulled ahead, then tilted her head back in. Big Jim swiveled around in his chair, a movement as gradual and laden with power as a rocket launch. She looked ahead, then shrank into her seat, her spirit crushed in an instant. Big Jim, silent but for the rasp of his breathing, stared at her for a full minute, then turned and faced the windshield, ground the gears--clearly for emphasis, he was an excellent driver--and drove on.
Not everyone on the bus was there as punishment; honor societies and clubs and the student senate all met after school. Some of the more clean-cut types would cluster in the first few rows, but more felt the way I did, that by boarding the late bus we too were implicated in the decline of western civilization, that we too were guilty, that we were no good. In fact, I felt worse when I took the bus home after a speech club meeting than I did when I was actually on detention.
I recognized most of the people in my own year, and knew which of them were the "do-ers," the good kids, and which were the "detentionites," the bad ones. As a class clown, I considered myself a double agent. My friends were all pretty straight. They did a lot of the same things that the other kids did--drank, smoked, had sex or at least purported to have had sex--but took honors classes and represented their homerooms in the student senate and would go to real colleges when they graduated. My general laziness about schoolwork barred me from the honors program, but the honor students kept me on as a sort of court jester. It was the same with some of my teachers--younger, less jaded ones like Mr. Drake. They indulged me in my antics and practical jokes, graded me better than I deserved for the work I turned in and tolerated my lies and excuses for the work I didn’t. I was a do-er who did nothing but crack jokes, a do-er who felt more comfortable making fun of my own shortcomings and more at home among the detentionites.
Dana was a couple of grades behind me, and I don’t think I’d ever seen her before I noticed her three days in a row on the late bus. What made me notice her was that she was reading a novel that was clearly not for a class, and that she was making significant progress in it from day to day. I didn’t read much myself, but I always liked the idea of it. The only reading matter that came into our house, not counting the anti-matter of my textbooks, was Life and another magazine connected to my father’s job as a liquor salesman. At breakfast, I would read the cereal box and then page through my father’s sales magazine. I wasn’t allowed to remove Life from the rack next to the toilet.
We also had some old hardback novels on the shelf in the living room, but no-one ever read them. They were so much a part of the decor it was hard to imagine they’d had words inside. It was Mitch Greenblatt who noticed that the colors of the dust jackets matched those in the sofa and carpet. And they all arrived at once, like the artwork and cushions, back when my mother was in a short-lived decorating phase. One book always fascinated me, a copy of Philip Roth’s When She Was Good, because it showed a woman’s mouth on the cover and there was a drop of blood on her lip. What did the bleeding lip have to do with her being good?
After a couple of days watching Dana read her novel, I wished I knew her to talk to. I didn’t really know any girls to talk to, since the only times I spoke to girls were to crack jokes or propose marriage. I had never asked a girl out; I took it on faith that no girl would go out with me. So instead of risking humiliation, I tried to make them laugh by asking them to marry me, at first with lines stolen from Groucho Marx, later with quips I came up with on my own. After proposing, though, I never had anything else to say, so the next few times I’d see them I’d just smile dumbly until they laughed or, if they hadn’t been amused, clucked their tongues and went away. Even though I had a new line I was anxious to try, I didn’t want to use it on Dana and then not be able to talk to her again.
I spent the next few rides home trying to think up a way of talking to her. Each time I watched her get off at her stop I knew she might not be back the next day, but to confront her without a plan was suicide. There was the book she was reading, but I was sure I’d mispronounce the author’s name. I’d even considered telling her why I found her so interesting. It wasn’t only the reading, it was the way she looked. Not like a soccer star’s girlfriend, but not like anything else either, not even the bookworm girls from the honors crowd with thick glasses and good posture. She didn’t look like anyone on TV, in Life or even in the ads in that liquor magazine. She had a look all her own, which was scary because it made it impossible to tell anything about her, and until I knew who she was I wasn’t sure who to be myself. All I could think about, as I watched her step off the late bus day after day, was that I had to find out why she was on it in the first place.
I had stationed myself at what had become my habitual post, two rows behind her and across the aisle. Hypnotized by the motion of the bus and by Dana’s placidity, I was surprised to see her shut her book a full ten minutes from her stop. She stared at it for a few seconds and then nodded her head, as if in response. Turning to pack it in her satchel, she caught me watching her.
"I always hate to finish a book," she said.
"Yeah," I said, "I know." Having seldom finished a book, I really didn’t know, which made it difficult to do anything besides knowingly repeat "I know" while my mind jammed its circuits in search of a response. Finally I said, "You always want the story to go on."
"It’d be hard for her story to go on," she said, displaying a copy of Madame Bovary as if she were a game show model. "She dies! Anyway, it’s not the story so much. It’s hard to say. It’s like the writing itself I wish would go on. Know what I mean?"
Yes. No. Will you marry me?
"You mean ‘cause you get to like know the narrator?"
"Sometimes, but more just the way they use words. Sometimes you’re reading along and then you notice a really great phrase or something, and you have to stop and read it again. I don’t know, it becomes something more than just words. Like words and music all at the same time."
And then I did know what she meant. In a way. I remembered once on line in the Arthur Treacher’s with Mitch, he abruptly sank to the floor convulsed with laughter. "What?" I said. He couldn’t bring words out of his face, which was rapidly turning the color of an overripe tomato. He pointed at the menu up behind the counter, which I had just read without finding anything amusing. He subsided to the point where he could speak and said, "Battered shrimp!" Then he was off again.
Mitch was the smartest person I knew. In fact, I idolized him. But I thought he’d blown a head gasket right there in Arthur Treacher’s, under the disapproving smirk of the girl at the register.
"Think of it," he urged. "Little shrimps with black eyes, in casts, on crutches. A battered shrimp shelter. Ads on TV at two in the morning, ‘Every ten seconds in America a shrimp is battered. Won’t you help?’"
Then I got the joke. And after that I began to find inadvertent humor almost everywhere. Mostly I made jokes out of lines in my textbooks. It gave me a new feeling to think I could see something in the words that the person who wrote them never saw. I figured in a novel the author could put in stuff like that on purpose for people like Dana to find.
It also gave me a new feeling to talk to Dana about it. With my friends, I had learned never to mention anything about my family or feelings; it was just inviting them to make fun of me. And in return any hidden detail I uncovered about one of them set my mind in search of the most devious way to sting him with it later on. But on the bus that day I told Dana stuff I’d never tell Lenny or even Mitch. And she told me about her favorite books, most of which I’d never heard of. One of them was Lolita, and I gasped idiotically when she said it because I’d thought it was supposed to be a dirty book. She told me her favorite line in the book from memory. It was about a guy getting his money back after making a long distance call on a public phone, and the words themselves almost sounded like coins falling into a change slot.
When we got to her stop, she slung her bag over her shoulder, said, "See you tomorrow, prob’ly," and was gone. Cindy Setren got off at the same stop. I saw her take out a pack of cigarettes and it looked as if she was handing one to Dana. Only then did I realize I had never found out what she was: do-er or detentionite. It didn’t seem to matter when we were talking, but once she was gone I got nervous about it. She read a lot, which suggested do-er, but went off with Cindy Setren, who, of all the girls in high school, exemplified sex, crime and drugs.
At home, I looked on the shelf in the living room to see if we had any of the books she’d mentioned. I knew we wouldn’t have Lolita, but it turned out we had another book by Vladimir Nabokov called Pale Fire. I took it into my room and opened it up to read it, the spine resisting and making soft cracking sounds when I pressed it flat on my desk.
There was an introduction by someone else, so I went past that, but then the book turned out to be not a novel at all but a poem. No way was I going to read a poem! The cover said it was a novel, but it was the weirdest novel I'd ever seen. I flipped through the whole thing and the poetry part wasn't very long, but the rest didn't look like a story either. It was all notes on the poem and an index in the back, like an English textbook. The foreword was written by Charles Kinbote in a place called Cedarn, Utana. Utah, Montana, a fake state, so even the foreword was fake. Fortified by my first cursory interpretation, I resolved to read Pale Fire so I could tell Dana about it the next day on the bus.
The foreword was not encouraging. Just a boring description of the mechanics of the poem and poet, John Shade, who I guessed was fake, too. Plus there were words I didn't understand, and we didn't own a dictionary. I tried looking them up in the World Book encyclopedia in the living room, but it didn't have definitions of words, just facts about things. This was probably the first time I'd opened the encyclopedia since I was ten and used it to gross out my cousin Rachel with the transparent pages that showed the innards of a frog. Closing "F," having failed to discover the meaning of "farrago," I noticed for the first time how well the row of uniform cream volumes with bluegreen trim and gold lettering brought out the colors in the lampshades.
In an hour I read no more than eight pages and had a throbbing headache. It was all about the poem and a bunch of scholars quibbling over who had the right to publish it. The only line that struck me did so because it had absolutely nothing to do with anything else. In the middle of describing Shade's writing habits, Kinbote says, "There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings." It was funny because later on when he's arguing about the length of the poem he says, "and damn that music," and you think he means he doesn't like the poem but then you’re not sure because it could be music coming from the amusement park.
When I had read a single sentence over five times and still couldn't get it, I gave up on it and on Dana, too. I wanted to feel the way she did about books, but I couldn’t even read a book by someone she’d read and she was two years younger than me. When I saw her the next day I’d try my new line on her and that would be an end to it. "Are you married? Would you consider marriage? Would you consider group sex on a one-to-one basis?" Either she'd laugh or frown, and either way I’d never know what to say next.
End of Part One.
Read the exciting conclusion of The Late Bus
© 1994 David Cohen "The Late Bus" first appeared in Crescendo3, 1995.
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